Trump’s March on Chicago
Trump used a thin pretext to invade LA. Now he aims to send the National Guard into Chicago and Portland—just because he can.
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I’m not into click-bait headlines heralding the death of democracy. Democracy is a system; an idea. It’s hard to pin a precise expiration date on something like that. You rarely go to sleep in a free society and wake up under a dictatorship. Authoritarianism erodes freedom steadily.
But there are waypoints on the road to democratic oblivion. Each one you pass makes it harder to turn around.
For the United States, the National Guard’s imminent deployment to Chicago is one such juncture. Like Route 66, democracy might hit its terminus in the Windy City.
A federal court has twice ruled that Trump acted illegally in dispatching the National Guard and US Marines to Los Angeles. Trump appealed the ruling and actively tried to find loopholes that would allow him to send California National Guard troops into Portland after a judge blocked his attempt to mobilize the Oregon National Guard. A court has now blocked this attempted workaround. And the State of Illinois is suing Trump over what Governor JB Pritzker rightly calls an “invasion.”
Any other president might think twice about sending soldiers into an American city in defiance of a court decision while the legality of such action was uncertain, at best.
Trump is gearing up to send the troops into Chicago anyway, because he is not any other president.
Even though a judge blocked the deployment of out-of-state troops in Oregon, the Defense Department is readying National Guardsmen from Texas to join federalized Illinois troops in the Chicago area. That’s significant. Remember that government forces are less likely to hurt people who could be their neighbors. In 1989, Chinese authorities deliberately brought in troops from the countryside to suppress the student protests on Tiananmen Square because they believed Beijing-based units might not comply. During the Soviet period, the Kremlin moved internal security forces from the far reaches of the USSR to suppress dissent. Putin has renewed that practice, with soldiers shipped in from distant provinces to put down protests in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
What Trump is trying to do now in Portland and Chicago is even more egregious than his armed intervention in Los Angeles. In LA, there was real civil unrest alongside peaceful protests. Did it rise to the level of a “rebellion,” as the administration has argued? Obviously not. But it at least provided visual cover for military action.
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In Portland and Seattle there is no immediate casus belli. Instead, Trump told a gathering of top generals and admirals last week that “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”
Portland and Chicago experience many of the same problems as other big cities in America, but they wouldn’t even crack a list of the country’s most dangerous municipalities. The two cities are neither urban utopia nor crisis-plagued hellscape. They just are. And Trump is about to sic the military on these places just ‘cause.
And in Chicago, especially, the most violent actors have been masked federal agents. In the past week, federal agents led by ICE ransacked apartments and put children in zip-tie handcuffs. They also tossed a tear gas canister out of a car window near an elementary school. The feds injured multiple Chicago Police officers while on duty in one neighborhood where residents came out to plead for an end to the use of gas. They’ve lied about their actions so aggressively that reporters proactively note that they are unable to corroborate the federal government’s account, and state officials have dismissed them as a trusted source of information.
When Trump federalized the California National Guard, he was floating a trial balloon for American authoritarianism. He abused his authority with a thin pretext. Since he was not sufficiently deterred, he is about to abuse his authority again with no pretext at all.
Legal interventions against the federal government have slowed the president, but they have not stopped him. Supporters of US democracy must go further. Any elected official who cares about the Constitution needs to be clear: Commanders who execute illegal orders will face consequences—Democratic jurisdictions might consider threatening rogue officers with prosecution, imposing an effective travel ban on those directly complicit in the crackdown. At a certain point, the top brass need to speak up too.
Nearly two-and-a-half centuries of democratic tradition in America mean that Trump has a lot of ground to cover in dismantling America’s institutions. But as I wrote recently, tradition is not an ironclad guarantee of enforcement. Deep roots won’t save the proverbial tree of liberty from someone wielding a chainsaw. Codified safeguards are a stronger defense, but only as long as a considerable majority is willing to enforce them. Each time the president runs a constitutional red light, he presses his foot harder on the accelerator.
Russia started its descent into KGB dictatorship much farther down the road than America. We might say that Russians lived under a weak democracy for the first year or so after the Soviet Union collapsed. And that is being generous.
My country’s abortive experiment with liberty sputtered out in the early 1990s, somewhere between the burnt-out parliament building in Moscow and the killing fields of Chechnya. Russians never had a constitution and or any kind of democratic institutions that were actually respected. America does. Use them or lose them.
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According to retired, high ranking officers, those still in the military are already asking how to disobey orders. The governors need to do more than make statements and file lawsuits. They need to work actively to organize their citizens on the ground.
I've posted this elsewhere, but sharing again because I think it's important.
Here’s my suggestion for everyone: if you see masked guys like this with guns and law enforcement markings trying to cuff someone, ask them once to show their law enforcement identification card. Not a badge. An ID card that shows this person actually works for a law enforcement agency. If they refuse, call 911 immediately and report an armed kidnapping in progress. Let CPD take it from there. And record everything.
I’m a federal criminal defense attorney and I’ve had real cases in the Chicago area where robbery crews went around dressed as federal agents—with guns, badges, vests, dashboard lights, handcuffs, etc.—roll up on victims and then commit armed robberies, kidnappings for ransom, home invasions, and torture after they’ve “arrested” them.
That’s why masked guys claiming to be cops running around grabbing people is such a dangerous thing. Unless and until proven otherwise, I would not take anyone’s word that they really are law enforcement if they’re hiding their face and won’t show identification.
Reporting this as a crime does two things. First, they really may not be cops. If they aren’t and that guy goes in the vehicle, we’ll be lucky to see him again.
Second, it creates a local paper trail documenting the incident. When the cops arrive they have to check ID and will have to write an incident report. This ensures there’s a record of who these guys actually are and of who they’re trying to haul away, as well as whether there was a warrant.
They wear masks and hide their identities because they don’t want to be held accountable by the courts and the public. This is the most effective counter to that problem that I can think of.
(FWIW, it’s also why they’re targeting people for immigration offenses, not criminal offenses. It cuts the judicial system out of the loop, avoiding any inconvenient questions from a judge. But that’s a different discussion.)